How women are paying for the recession in the UK

It was predictable and in fact
predicted. The British Government’s austerity programme has turned back the clock on
women’s rights and hard-won economic gains.

Here is some good news. The August UK
unemployment figures reveal a slight fall in the number of unemployed
people, a drop of 46,000 to 2.56 million. The detailed figures show that men
who took the initial impact of the recession are slowly finding their way back
into work. That is the end of the good news.

For women and for young people, and thus
for young women in particular, the economic outlook could hardly be gloomier.
The number of 16-24 year olds looking for work remains stubbornly high at more
than a million. Not only does this age group make up a worryingly high proportion
of total joblessness, an increasing number of these young men and women are
staying unemployed for months on end, becoming accustomed to having no job and
losing all faith in finding one.

For women, too, the August figures show a bad situation
deteriorating further. The number of those seeking work is now more than a
million, an all-time high, according to the Fawcett Society which last March
predicted that as public sector cuts got underway half a million more women
would also be at risk of losing their jobs.

These are not jobs that will return in any
future economic upturn and the Government has announced no strategy for
replacing them. In some geographical areas the public sector has been the only
significant employer of women. Ministers merely reaffirm the mantra that the
private sector, in a proper deregulated framework, will eventually pick up the
slack.

Given the planned further contraction of
the public sector and that 70 per cent of the public sector workforce is
female, it is certain that the burden of unemployment will continue to fall
more heavily on women in the immediate future. The Fawcett Society reports that in
some areas, 100 per cent of local authority jobs lost had been held by women.

Mini-jobs

There is cause for concern, too, at the
nature of the jobs that are disappearing and about what kind of work will
replace them. Local authorities and public services have traditionally offered
positions of varying skill levels at lowish pay (compared to some private
sector counterparts), offset by relatively better job security, structured
career paths and terms and conditions that acknowledge the needs of parents.

The private sector is under no pressure at
all to match these family-friendly values. Far from it. A substantial number of
Conservative backbenchers favour radical
deregulation and the dismantling of almost all existing protective
legislation. Despite some dissent
in the Lib-Dem ranks, the Chancellor and other senior figures insist that
employers need, and should be given, freedom from working-hour directives,
minimum wage laws and other “stifling” employment legislation.

This could mean, for example, zero-hour
contracts or, last week’s Big Idea, "mini-jobs".
Under the former, a worker would agree to be available for, say, 20 hours a
week; in return an employer would guarantee, well ... nothing at all. The
“mini-job” was proposed as a useful possibility for young school-leavers. It is
a scheme borrowed from Germany whereby unemployed people can take on jobs of up
to about €400 a month, losing some benefits (if they receive them) but paying
no tax and insurance. There could hardly be a better blueprint for the creation
of a new UK “precariat”.

The dangers of creating a class of
disaffected young men and women who spend their important post-school or
post-college years between dole and casual work have been spelt out by many.
Young women who leave school or university and are unable to find jobs that offer further training
or career structures are at even
greater risk of blighted futures. They may find that they have barely put down
roots in any career at all by the time they start a family. When they do find
work, it will be in lower-paid jobs. If they are by now mothers they will
continue in low-paid jobs or perhaps zero-hour contracts.

There are further ways in which the job
market is becoming increasingly unfriendly to women. Part-time work has been an
important option for parents. There are now eight million part-time workers,
the highest number since comparable records began in 1992. But one and a half
million of these part-time workers, both men and women, are actually looking
for full-time work. It is becoming increasingly difficult for women who can
only undertake part-time work to secure jobs they can combine with childcare.

Gender audit

Campaigning organisations such as the Women’s Budget Group and the Women’s Resource Centre, who tried to warn
policy makers of the likely gender impact of the cuts at the time of the 2010
Emergency Budget, could justifiably argue that the consequences for women
we are now seeing were not only the predictable outcome of Coalition policies,
they were indeed very precisely predicted.

Soon after the Chancellor of the Exchequer
announced his emergency measures in June 2010, the Labour MP Yvette Cooper, a
former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, commissioned
a gender audit from the House of Commons library. The detailed study of the
likely impact of the Budget revealed that women would bear a disproportionate
burden of the Budget cuts. Of the £8bn net revenue the measures were intended
to raise by 2014-15, nearly £6bn would come from cuts to services and benefits
to women.

The consequent closing down of opportunities
for women comes after two decades of steady gains in education and employment
and growing expectations. It had become commonplace to hear not only that girls
had caught up with boys but in many educational achievements had outshone them.
Teenage girls celebrating educational achievement have become something of a
cliché in the media and, though there were clearly far from feminist reasons why
newspapers preferred using pictures of photogenic girls rather than awkward
teenage boys, such images reinforced the general perception that 21st
century girls were going places. (For a satirical take on the media’s
enthusiasm for pictures of shrieking, leaping teenage girls celebrating their
“triple-As”, take a look at the very funny “It’s sexy A-levels” website.)

Earlier this month, the TUC expressed concern at the deeper social
trends revealed by the gloomy workless figures. Its analysis,
published to coincide with the unemployment figures, argued that young people
faced “the toughest outlook since 1994”. Despite large numbers of young people
in full-time education, the proportion of “NEETS” - those not in education
employment or training - is, at 20.4 per cent, the highest it has been for 20
years. To find a comparable period
of inactivity for this age group you have to go back to 1992, the period of
recession following the Thatcher years.

But the TUC also noted another way in which
we are turning the clock back. Young men are, once again, more likely than
young women to be in work or education (80.6 per cent compared to 78.5 per
cent). It is not a big difference. But is it possible that we will see the
steady gains made by young women between 1992 and 2008 halted or reversed?

About the author

Barbara Gunnell is a writer and editor. She
has worked on the Financial Times,
the Independent, the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, the New Statesman and openDemocracy. She is chair of the trustees of the IF Project, and a past-president of the National Union of Journalists.

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